The Trump administration has dropped an attempt to access the personal information of an anti-Trump Twitter account after the social media company threatened to take them to court.
The account in question is @ALT-USCIS, one of the many Twitter accounts using the conceit of an "alternative" government agency to protest President Trump.
The account's feed is mostly critiques of Trump's administration, with one recent picture of the First Amendment.
But there's nothing in the account about imported merchandise — which is odd, because that was apparently why the feds were going after it.
Twitter's lawsuit claimed U.S. Customs and Border Protection demanded @ALT-USCIS' account information under a part of the U.S. code that governs duties on imported merchandise.
Twitter does sometimes provide user information to the U.S. government. The government made almost 5,000 requests for account information in 2016, and Twitter cooperated at least partially on 82 percent of those requests.
But since the government hadn't demonstrated that @ALT-USCIS was linked to a criminal investigation, Twitter filed suit. The next day, the government withdrew its request.
